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The EU has to protect its borders, there's no other option. Not doing so is a political suicide. People here don't want to share their wealth with immigrants and they don't want their mostly homogenous societies being changed by an influx of people with different behavior, culture, religion, language, etc.

But I think there will be an interesting twist - aging of the population. This feels like an abstract problem, but it will become very real.

The problem is the scale. How many people can you realistically lock up in camps, especially considering those camps are leverage for the dictators you’re making deals with to operate them?

Either the root causes get fixed or things start breaking, badly.

I don't think it's a problem. On land, you can use drones, walls and fences. On the sea, don't allow boats get into your territory.

In addition, there are many "soft" measures. Cooperation with countries like Lybia and Turkey. Help to alleviate the problems they are running from. Announce that anyone who crosses illegaly will not receive an asylum. Etc.

At the same time if you do nothing then you turn a sprinkle into a roaring river which is equally as hard and expensive to deal with.

The sheer number of people who keep moving after reaching France, Germany etc to try and get the UK, purely because they like the UK more, shows that choice and relatively small differences in final living conditions can have a dramatic effect.

> The EU has to protect its borders, there's no other option.

As an European, I agree. At the very least, I think that we have the right to protect our borders.

However, this is not an isolated thing that can be morally decided independently of the rest of our foreign policy. We have provoked and participated in many wars in neighboring countries to defend our "economic interests". We are supporting authoritarian dictatorships in Africa so that European enterprises exploiting their natural resources have an easier job. Heck, when a neighboring country (Libya) threatened a bit our cheap oil supply (that is, our supply of their oil) we got all angry and violent and provoked a war there to change the regime.

Most of the immigrants in question come from countries that we have messed with. We certainly have the right to close our borders to them, but to do so we must first stop destroying and exploiting their countries.

> We have provoked and participated in many wars in neighboring countries to defend our "economic interests".

"We"? How many of those wars were started by popular demand, with protests on the streets demanding our leaders take military action? "We" are being blamed for the actions of oil and weapons lobbyists (whose wars are paid by our taxes), and then asked to face the consequences of the actions due to their subversion of democracy.

We pay for the wars we don't want, we get the blame, we get to deal with the immigrants, and in the end, we still have to pay for the oil - the oil companies that benefit (always unnamed) don't hand it out for free!

> We pay for the wars we don't want

Simple solution: don’t vote for people who start wars? The EU claims to be one of the most democratic entities. Why do people complain they’re being screwed by some minority group?

I don’t think elections are being won by being honest about your military intentions.

People did vote for people who didn't want to start wars. For example, Donald Trump was elected on an anti-interventionist platform and attempted to pursue it as Commander-in-Chief of the United States armed forces. The wars didn't cease, and late in the Trump administration prominent Pentagon officials actually bragged in public how they lied to the President and his officials for years and unconstitutionally misappropriated military resources to continue the foreverwars until he was out of office. Trump was specifically elected to end the endless quagmire of foreign intervention and mass immigration, and yet it turns out that there are no democratic or peaceful means to eliminate these things. Believing you simply have to stop voting for the military-industrial complex is counter to all available data and just incredibly naive at the outset.

Trump sped up climate change, making the scenario in the article happen more and more often. People like him (Trump) are some of the worst, for those living in Africa. (Also, the voters in the US didn't primarily vote for Trump for the reasons you seem to think.)

Okay but that doesn't change the fact that Trump tried with withdraw the troops from Syria and the Pentagon officials lied to his face and told him they took the troops out, and later bragged in public about misleading the duly elected President. That's a thing that happened, regardless of what reasons you think people elected Trump for, even though the economy, immigration, and anti-war sentiments were vigorously popular reasons among the base.

The point is that you are not allowed to vote against war anymore. It is demonstrably not possible to vote a different Commander-in-Chief in and end the war. Republicans tried that.

We are also not in Syria because of climate change. We are there because they are a geopolitical adversary of Israel.

> We pay for the wars we don't want, we get the blame, we get to deal with the immigrants, and in the end, we still have to pay for the oil - the oil companies that benefit (always unnamed) don't hand it out for free!

I understand the evil ways of our leaders... However, I cannot face a person whose town has been bombed to oblivion by my purportedly elected officials, and tell him that I'm a "victim of the system" just like him.

As for "protests on the streets", I've certainly participated in most of the anti-war protests that have happened around me. Problem is that my neighbours consistently keep voting for our ever murderous leadership!

If you need, you don't need to bring people from the most orthogonal cultures.

(Though that's only half the problem, and when you get xenophobia even against French in Quebec you see it's complicated)

> People here don't want to share their wealth with immigrants and they don't want their mostly homogenous societies being changed by an influx of people with different behavior, culture, religion, language, etc.

That ship has sailed for many countries.

> People move across borders when they need to.

Both Hungary and Poland have shown that a modern state can largely prevent illegal crossing of its borders. We have the technology. It's not that difficult. Even easier when you have a sea acting as a barrier.

When the migration happens on a massive scale regardless, it's usually with tacit or explicit establishment's approval.

This is a temporary situation with relatively few people involved. Counterexample: the US - Mexico border.

Keeping an airtight border is a very expensive task. You can probably be harder to get into than the next country, but in the context of the EU, that's not really a solution, it's just a way to make the problem worse.

The goal is not to have 100% foolproof solution, but one that makes it not worth a try.

People are willing to risk their children drowning in the Mediterranean in order to get into the EU. How much worse can we make it?

They only do that because they believe they can succeed. Widespread propaganda could resolve that.

But Hungary and Poland aren't a destination goal for the vast majority of migrants, so they only have to make the route through their countries worse or harder than alternative routes. That's not comparable to the EU as a whole.

Actually, seeking an asylum is perfectly legal. What those border countries are doing is illegal.

Also, seems like the values changed drastically after 2015. I was told it was our moral obligation to help the refugees. Now it’s 180 degree turn. Makes you think helping people wasn’t really a value in the first place, since those can’t change so radically.

The EU as an institution/trans-national government has virtually no identifiable values beyond self-expansion and consolidation of power. All other claimed values disappear the moment they come into conflict with those other two.

Consider human rights. The ECJ loves to overrule government decisions on migration/asylum on the grounds of human rights, they do it all the time. The inability to deport Islamic "hate preachers" was one of the contributing factors in the Brexit campaign, in fact. Yet the moment Austria placed a large fraction of its own population under indefinite house arrest without trial, in violation of the Nurenberg Code no less, the EU was mysteriously silent.

Or how about the rule of law. When eastern European countries were electing conservative politicians the EU couldn't shut up about how the "rule of law" was being violated, though they never quite explained how. Then Latvia's parliament banned unvaccinated MPs from voting, violating the most basic rule a democracy has and at a stroke disenfranchising whole chunks of their population. Once again, the EU couldn't find anything to say about this.

I rest this case with a few quotes from Jean-Claude Juncker, former head of the EU Commission. He said these things whilst running the EU's most powerful body:

"We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back."

"When the going gets tough, you have to lie."

"I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious ... I am for secret, dark debates"

"I believe neither the French nor the Dutch really rejected the constitutional treaty." (they did, of course)

In the end the, the EU does have values but those values are not the sort of values they're willing to publicly advertise.

Well, the basics remain the same

Asylum is not a "free migration card" as some NGOs or some people purport it to be. You don't get it just because you were born in a poor country.

And as much as some maybe, sheltered (or just idealistic) think borders shouldn't exist, no, they're there for a reason.

And the more asylum gets abused the more it will be harder to get.

The EU is paying Turkey to make sure people do not show up to request asylum in the first place. You think there's someone from the EU making an assessment of how many people in Turkish camps would be legally entitled to asylum, reporting back in a way that determines who gets held in those camps? Please. The EU is already taking steps to hold back migrants, whatever their need for aid.

> Asylum is not a "free migration card" as some NGOs or some people purport it to be. You don't get it just because you were born in a poor country.

One problem is that if asylum is refused, very few are forcibly repatriated. Most just ending up living in the EU illegally.

Sounds like this mirrors the situation in the United States, where the root causes are political instability and economic devastation in nations of the south, some of which exacerbated by American policies.

The war on drugs is over. Drugs won and the loser was Mexico.

No, people don’t just “move across borders if they need to”. This is what militaries are for, to enforce sovereignty. Saying that is impossible is undermining the notion of statehood.

There are 11 million people in the US who "moved across borders when they needed to". Is there a country people want to migrate to that successfully keeps them out?

This is a fraction of the actual population which would happily move to the US but is kept away by immigration controls. 11 million on a population of 330 million is 3%.

Are you saying it's impossible to keep 3% of the people out?

It’s possible, just not worth the effort.

You think the whole population of Mex wants to "happily move" into gringolandia? Naive and arrogant at the same time.

I mean there are people from all around the world who would like to move to the U.S, I guess because their situations in their home countries suck enough to warrant it or some cases because they are personally ambitious and the U.S is seen as the place to realize that ambition. Many of them are not allowed to move though because of immigration controls.

Efforts to keep them out are constantly being sabotaged from within, it's not exactly proof we couldn't.

So you are saying the solution is for the EU to take an active role in the government of the Middle East and Africa? Perhaps through establishing some kind of colony? I am sure I have heard of this before. The US invested hundreds of billions in attempting to secure the Middle East...that win them a lot of friends down there?

The problem isn't political instability or war. Both things have existed in the past, even within Europe, and there has been no migrant crisis. European nations have always taken huge numbers of asylum seekers, the doors are still open but it has to happen legally and in a controlled way...Europe is a democracy after all. And be clear, there are lots of economic migrants too...some from Sudan, some from Syria but the majority are economic migrants (I am in the UK, admittedly the stuff you see here is particularly extreme but you have asylum seekers taking over LGBT support groups or getting confirmed so they don't get sent back...it is crazy). That is why the article talks about climate change a lot (nutty right-wingers were saying this would be the justification years ago...funny how things work out, it is now apparently an argument made by very serious people...it is bizarre because Africa has one of the greatest endowments of arable land anywhere, so why these people are seeking to move to a region with less arable land and no route for migrants to acquire land is...beyond me)...although I am not sure what someone seeing his brother making money in Spain has to do with climate change, Elon Musk is making tons of money in the US so can I claim asylum there?

Right now, you have activist groups assisting human traffickers, we have no idea who is coming here or why, we have people who are suffering in our own countries (youth unemployment is often lower in the places these people are coming from)...the only solution is to do what governments are doing. Be totally clear too, the only people who differ on this point are people who believe that borders should not exist. That is fine, but this minority view should not be imposed on the public through undemocratic means (the amount of money here is huge: human traffickers are making hundreds of thousands per day, activist groups are collecting wheelbarrows of cash from donors...a lot of people are getting very rich, very fast).

This isn't something that the public is going to yield on. In the UK, an asylum seeker who was cosplaying as a Christian killed an MP. Sweden, bombings through the roof, shooting through the roof. France, attacks on churches and priests constantly. There is a reason why this is happening...these people are not legitimate asylum seekers, there are no controls, they are here to take and not contribute (and btw, both sides of my family were migrants, I know asylum seekers that came to the UK from Uganda, I have friends who are coming here from HK now...the mentality in some parts of the UK is already totally different to the groups that we welcomed in the past, the UK is still tolerant but look at Europe...you are seeing that this is creating real opposition to all forms of migration, it is very worrying, it is having the opposite effect that the "open borders" crowd think, they are creating the thing they say they are fighting).